SEO Tips – making your web page SEO friendly

March 29, 2009

OK so in our last 2 posts we have covered SEO Friendly file names and building an SEO friendly navigation system for your site. So often you see a nice clothing company site, great products, innovative designs, spent a few grand on the site but no one can find it.

Now our previous posts should have got your started thinking about your brand, the site organization, your market niche and your site navigation, now bring them into play we look at the content of your site pages to see if they continue the consistent message you are trying to build into your site.

First up make sure you have some text content on your page even if it’s just a keyword rich product description. Search engines use this to identify the subject of the page. No title, no text and just a product picture and they don’t have much to go on.

So we have our keywords set for each page, now we just need to make sure we add them to the content of the page.

• Use it in your page title
• Use it in your product description
• Use it in the alt tags for your images. (Make sure you have alt tags!)

Remember just one keyword per page and the more pages you have the better the keyword reach. Even consider having a page for each of your products so you can feature them individually. Of course your main emphasis would still be your store, but again it would give you more keywords.

OK a word of warning, people will try to tell you there’s a magic method for ensuring search engine success – that’s not true, there are too many variables. Steer clear of any grey areas, hiding text, keyword stuffing, link farms etc. The key to long term success is to make your page content relevant to your keywords, title and description.

So if you have urban t shirts as your keyword set for that page make sure the page contains er… urban t shirts with text that references that fact, making the page more relevant. Even better have it as you page title in the H1 tag. Also make sure your images have a keyword relevant alt tag.

Many elements go to making your site more visible, the length of time on the web, the quality of your content, your ability to attract relevant incoming links etc so the best you can do is try to get your structure right and stick with it, updating your site and feeding the search engines your new content. Consider a blog with RSS for your site also, as that will also broadcast your content across the web.

OK so what about the structure of the meta tags. Again no magic formula but here’s and outline of a possible scenario to get you started. Remember keep it relevant: here our keyword set is Urban Wear, we’ll say the company name is Onix wear.

<title>Urban wear: Authentic urban wear from Onix Wear, designers of men's and women's urban wear.</title>

<META NAME=“description” CONTENT=“Onix Wear urban wear, is authentic urban wear, featuring men’s and women’s urban t shirts and casual urban wear.”>
<META NAME=“keywords” CONTENT=“Onix wear, urban wear, authentic urban wear, women’s urban wear, customized urban wear, men’s urban wear”>
<META NAME=“rating” CONTENT=“General”>
<META NAME=“MS.LOCALE” CONTENT=“EN-US”>
<META NAME=“CATEGORY” CONTENT=“home page”>
<META NAME=“robots” CONTENT=“index,follow”>
<META http-equiv=“Classification” CONTENT=“urban wear”>
<META NAME=“revisit-after” CONTENT=“31 days”>

I found this book a great help when i was learning about search engine optimization (SEO)

Once you have done this construct the content of your page to reflect the meta tags you have just created,  including the terms “urban wear” prominently in the title, subtitle and also in the text body, more than once if relevant. Once you have everything in place and this includes images of your “urban wear” with the alt tag on your image specified also to include urban wear and also any links pointing into this page containing “Urban Wear” and you should be set.

Post your page in a test area and run a <a href=”http://www.seochat.com/seo-tools/keyword-density/” target=”_blank”>keyword density</a> check on your page. Again no magic number. But take a look to see if your chosen keywords are at about 3%.

So once you have things in place on your test page you can replicate this on your other pages.

Word of warning, if you are getting reasonable traffic altering your meta tags etc may disrupt your traffic and in some cases reduce it. So sometimes it’s a good idea to get another domain and try things out there or try new ideas on new site pages and see how they compare to the current site pages you have.

Move slowly with this, you don’t want to lose the gains you have made so far.

So there you have it, a start on search engine optimization, coupled with other marketing efforts a critical plank in the ongoing success and growth of your clothing company.

Posted in SEO, Search Engine Optimization